1892.] S. E. Peal — Communal Barracks of Primitive Races. 247 



" marriage and the family " amongst the lower animals, shewing 

 conclusively that they are by no means peculiarly human institutions. 



The various and singular forms of sexual association, past and 

 present, he has also clearly laid before us, though singularly enough 

 entirely omitting one which is of the utmost importance, and to which 

 it is desirable to draw attention. The omission is in regard to the 

 peculiar institution of barracks for the unmarried, which under so many 

 surviving forms, and endless names, extends from the Himalaya and 

 Formosa on the north, to New Zealand and Australia on the south ; 

 from eastern Polynesia, to the west coast of Africa. 



One of the first things to strike the student who is fairly well 

 acquainted with the head-hunting and semi-savage races of the 

 north-eastern frontier of Bengal, on reading travels in the Malayo- 

 Pacific Archipelago, is the similarity, and at times identity, of so many 

 singular customs over this widely scattered region. 



Not only do we find, as Sir Henry Yule pointed out in the Journal of 

 tJie Anthropological Institute for February 1880, that head-hunting, pile- 

 dwelling, blackening the teeth, aversion to milk, " jhuming," and bar- 

 racks for the unmarried, extend from India to New Guinea and other 

 places, but that when the matter is carefully looked into, quite a 

 large number of other singular customs come into view, and that the 

 area over which these customs prevail, extends over a far larger part 

 of the earth's surface than Sir Henry Yule had suspected. 



Taken by itself this institution of organized " barracks for the 

 unmarried," is sufficiently suggestive ; but when we notice that it is 

 only one of many peculiar social customs, which survive more or 

 less with it, among widely scattered races, the case is doubly note- 

 worthy ; first as a proof of former racial affinity among all these people, 

 and secondly, as a most important and suggestive factor in social 

 evolution generally. 



Their sociological significance it is the more necessary to study 

 as they are so obviously survivals ; and under modified forms are seen 

 amongst Indo-Mongols, Dravidians and Kols, Malays, Papuans, 

 Polynesians, Australians, and African races. 



For some years past racial affinity has been suspected among these 

 now distant races, and in these communal barracks we seem to have 

 a clear proof that the " survival of the fittest " among human customs 

 may long outlast both physical and linguistic variation. 



As might naturally be expected, with customs handed down from 

 a remote antiquity, among various races, there has been a large amount 

 of local geographical variation, and in some instances the subsidiary 

 customs have died out entirely. 



